Katharine A. Raff

Katharine A. Raff is the Elizabeth McIlvaine Curator, Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked since 2011. Her research focuses on ancient Roman art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture (including portraits, ideal sculptures, and funerary monuments) and the contexts in which such objects were made, used, and viewed over time. 

Her recent projects include the exhibition Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection (2025), for which she is co-curator; the reinstallation of the Art Institute’s permanent gallery of Roman art (2024); and Collecting Stories (2019), an installation on ancient artworks and their modern afterlives. Katharine was the editor and primary author of the 2017 digital scholarly catalogue Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), and she has also published on the museum’s holdings in Greek, Etruscan, and Byzantine art. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and was previously awarded fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.